Video: That Time Jeremy Lin Mistook New York's Koreatown for Times Square

July 25th, 2013 by Dan Washburn

The Jeremy Lin documentary Linsanity — which hits select theaters later this year — wouldn't have been the same without the involvement of Lin's parents, according to Christopher Chen, one of the film's producers. Initially, when approached by the prospective filmmakers, a skeptical Lin used his mother as a go-between, but once the family became more comfortable with the idea, Lin's father offered up the "Lin family archive," a treasure trove of "hundreds of hours" of footage from throughout Lin's life.

Chen shared the anecdote (you can watch it in the video above) Wednesday night at Asia Society in New York when he and fellow producers Allen Lu and Brian Yang and director Evan Jackson Leong discussed the origins of the film in a Q&A moderated by ESPN's Pablo Torre. A screening of Linsanity, which started as a Kickstarter campaign, preceded the discussion, marking the opening night of the 36th Asian American International Film Festival.

Torre shared a funny sidenote (also included in the video above) about Lin's time playing for the New York Knicks, the frenetic few months in 2012 that launched the "Linsanity" craze. "He didn't get to like go outside at all. ... He didn't like get to experience New York at all," he said. And then Torre recounted a story Lin once told him during an interview: "He was riding around in a cab or a car with one of his teammates on the Knicks, and he goes, 'Oh, is this Times Square?' — and they were in Koreatown."

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